About Me

Pilgrim, priest and ponderer. European living in Northumberland. I have been a parish priest, theological educator and cathedral precentor; then Dean of Sheffield 1995-2003 and Dean of Durham 2003-2015.****
I blog on faith, society, church matters, the North East, European issues, the arts, travel and anything else that intrigues.****
My main blog is at http://northernwoolgatherer.blogspot.com.****
My sermons and addresses are at:
http://northernambo.blogspot.com.****
Blogs during my time as Dean of Durham: http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.com.

Thursday, 22 June 2017

At a Service of Thanksgiving for Bob and Ruth Jeffery

I can hear Bob’s
advice to me as his curate ordained just a few weeks. “At funerals and
memorials, don’t preach about the person who’s died. Preach about God.” He was
right of course. And yet…. Isn’t a person’s life – yours, mine, Ruth’s, Bob’s
- the primary place where we read the traces of love’s work, where we discern
God to have been present in the joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of
being a woman, a man, where we learn how to speak about God out of our own lived
experience?

I think Bob would
say so. It was how he had been formed as a Christian and how he had learned the
art and the craft of Christian ministry. You could call it “being real” though
Bob would have hated the cliché like he hated all the easy speeches and
hackneyed phrases that fall unexamined off too many tongues. Being authentic as
a priest, a Christian and as a human being was Bob’s life task right up to the
moment he died. His faith and the language with which he spoke about it were
characteristically his own. They owed a great deal to the people who had
inspired him and he never tired of acknowledging the debt. But the experience
was his, and the words were his. He wouldn’t perhaps have owned the word artistry
to describe this. Yet I believe that under God we are called to be artists,
or co-artists, of our own lives and to do this means living in a state not only
of awareness but of being true to who we are in God.

Being present,
paying attention, living reflectively, truth-seeking were basic to Bob’s way of
understanding the world and God’s involvement in it. He didn’t have much time
for theological speculation and none at all for simpliste
slogans and what they usually
gave birth to, well-meaning but ill-considered strategies and programmes that
would sort out the church’s problems. One of his great spiritual guides, the
eighteenth century French Jesuit writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade, taught him to
be humble before the providence of God and not claim to know too much about the
divine plan for the world. Bob conscientiously refused to speak of things he
did not know about, things none of us can know about. What mattered was the
offering of life to God. To him, reticence was a virtue that went with the
modesty proper to a created being. And the complexity of life, and the
unknowability of so much of it, was part of its glory that God embraced in the
incarnation. He insisted that it had to be understood “from below”, inside the
experience of being living and sentient with mind and conscience and the
capacity to be aware and articulate the wonder of our own being. He believed
with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that in this
respect, religious faith, the God-given “examination” of life should make us more human, not less.

As David Thomas
says in his tribute in today’s service sheet, metaphor and poetry were
everything in this quest to interpret the human condition from the perspective
of the divine. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” said Emily Dickinson.
Faced with the task of finding words to express the inexpressible, there is no
alternative. I once preached a sermon at Headington, mercifully long-forgotten,
that Bob felt did not quite capture the spirit of the text. “The trouble is” he
said in the nicest possible way “there’s too much prose in your preaching, not
enough poetry and not enough paradox”. It was one of those moments that made me
stop and change course, not just as a preacher but as a theologian too. It’s
among many insights for which I have to thank a tolerant, cherished and wise
mentor.

But if he valued
reticence when it came to speaking about God, his practice of faith was
confident, joyful and large-hearted. He liked Bishop Ian Ramsey’s saying about
being “tentative in theology but sure in religion”. He proclaimed a God who in
Jesus, as the Fourth Gospel puts it, “loves us to the end”. In the words of our
reading from St Paul, God’s is a love from which nothing can ever separate us,
not height nor depth, not evil or disaster, not anything in all creation. I
guess there were times when that faith had to be fought for, most of all here
at Worcester that terrible morning when he found that his beloved Ruth had died
suddenly. Bob had always believed that if religion has nothing to say about
suffering and loss, then it has nothing to say. Such circumstances are the
severest test not only of the human being but of whether the faith he or she
professes can carry such a burden. Bob found that it could, because the bridge
to which he entrusted himself to carry him across the abyss was scaffolded with
love. That is what it means to be “sure in religion”.

To Bob, the
capacity to hold belief and doubt together, to explore, probe, debate, ask
questions was all part of having a mature faith. He reckoned that religion that
infantilised grown-ups into tribal submission and uncritical obedience was not
worthy of the name. James Fowler’s Stages of Faith had taught him, as
had Bonhoeffer before him, that faith
must “come of age” and it is the responsibility of a Christian leader to help
people discover religious adulthood for themselves. It takes courage to do
that. On the last page of his book Anima Christi he
wrote:
“Our pilgrimage is itself an act of faith and an act
of worship. We are moving towards the greater mystery of God which envelops us
all. Pilgrims live only by the mercy and grace of God. This means that we can
let go of security and certainties because we realise that God is in control.
We need nothing but to offer everything to God with willingness.” His children
say that even in his last illness, there was a curiosity about what he called
the “end game”, how to die as authentically as he had tried to live. His
favourite Psalm 139 was sung at his funeral: “O Lord, thou hast searched me out
and known me”. He wanted to be as alert and present to the truth of this in
dying as much as in living, and to discover how God would be “about his path
and about his bed” in his last Nunc Dimittis.

We are here today
to honour Bob and Ruth’s memory cherished not only in Worcester but also in
Sunderland, Barnes, Oxford and Tong, not to mention the British Council of
Churches and the General Synod. As Dean here, he worked tirelessly to save the
tower and conserve this great building. He and Ruth made their Deanery a place
not only of hospitality and welcome, but of jollity, stimulus, good
conversation about books and theology, church politics and the state of the
world.But he would have wanted these
tangible memories to be a metaphor of a lifelong investment as priest and
pastor whose generous vision of life touched the fabric of so many people. If I
learned one thing from Bob in the forty years I knew him, it was how to try to
understand and live just such a Christianity that is capable of reaching out to
the lives of others and of making a real difference in the world.

So what is Bob and Ruth’s lasting memorial? I think we can see it in the faces of all
of us who are here today, and many more who are not,whom they loved and cared for because they
prized the most precious gifts life can bestow: integrity, generosity,
community, a sense of place, kindness, laughter and the knowledge of God. What
unites us today is that our lives were touched by Bob and Ruth in the name of
the One who in Christ has himself touched us, searched us out and known us. In
his death and resurrection we are given back our lives once more, strengthened
by the promise that our hope was not in vain. For love was his meaning, and
always will be in both this world and the next.

Worcester Cathedral, 21 June 2017At the memorial service for The Very Reverend Robert
Martin Colquhoun JefferyRomans 8.31-39